Very small minds- Ben Carson

Of the 271 pages of Ben Carson’s The Big Picture novel, pages 197 and 198 got my attention the most (probably because of the stage of my life I’m in at the moment 🌝🤷‍♀️). 

          “When I encounter individuals who        focus most of their attention on skin color, whether their own or somebody else’s, I am reminded of red ants and black ants. You could invite both groups to the greatest picnic in the world with more sandwich and potato crumbs than they could carry off in a million years. But once they saw each other, they could not care less about what brought them there. They would soon be fighting each other to the death.

          Talk about the limitations of small minds. And yet so many human beings, despite having brains far weightier than whole colonies of ants, so often succumb to the same silliness. Still, the fruit of racism is so horrible that calling it “silliness” hardly seems a strong enough condemnation.  That human beings invest so much time and energy in something so meaningless as skin color really does seem exceedingly silly. If it were not such a sad waste of human potential, it would be laughable.

          As human beings, we are free to decide what is important to us. Deciding that a person’s skin color is ultimately important is as silly - and as irrelevant - as deciding a person’s eye color is important. Or the texture of their hair. Of course, none of these things defines a person’s worth or their ultimate value to the society. 

          What if we were to decide, instead, to be more interested in a person’s intellect and personality and spirit? What if we were to decide as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, the overall “content of their character” is what is of value in people? Well, that would be smart. That would be using the brains God gifted us with. So, what is keeping us from doing it?”

Where am I headed? 

First☝️, so true it is not to judge a book by its cover as all that glitters are not gold… and all that don’t glitter doesn’t mean it’s gold either 🌝😂

Second✌️, let’s relate to the book of the Bible - 1 Samuel 16:7 “The Lord does not look at the things that man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (… and Ify looks at what you’ve got upstairs 👩‍🦯)

In the big picture of life, physical attributes happen to be the least important. For Carson, “the skin is almost an afterthought” because he’s a neurosurgeon and it appears to be same for me too because I write from my brain. *me realizing Ben Carson and I have similarities* 😉😂

Actually, I would say I’m a sapiosexual and to clear the fog  on some people’s mind, I’d rather term sapiosexuality a mentality. What I could learn from you is what keeps me in whatever relationship I’m to have with you. The most I’d do to a person without intellect is to be on the acquaintance level with such person. (I do not mean academically this time). 

You see, putting looks as the most important blurs your vision of the big picture life shows you. What do I mean? 

Take a jigsaw puzzle for an instance: 

A situation where you’re almost done filling all the gaps, and you appear to be stuck in a particular blank for a long while. You finally find the missing tab and focus on the aesthetic of just that particular tab, forgetting the whole puzzle you’re to fix… Now let’s relate this to our lives 🙂

Our skin color, hair texture, lip shape, eye color and the likes are just there to make us different from one another. The one special thing God gave we humans to make us superior to all other living things is the brain i.e our creativity… so let’s make use of it, to the glorification of God especially. 

I’d like to let this known that coming to me with an “omg, my girlfriend’s body is so sexy” or a “can’t you see how long my hair is? I bet you can’t beat it no matter what” all the time would make you look nothing but stupid to my face🫥. 

 In my ‘your prime though, not mine’ (https://ifyssdv.blogspot.com/2024/09/your-prime-though-not-mine.html ) post, I discovered the DKD formula which is to Discover you, Know you and Develop you. Work on these three and pave your way on getting a clearer view of The Big Picture.😉🫶